Top blog posts of 2009

I guess everyone has a list of top this that or the other, so here is mine. I wrote a lot this year, what with all the travelling and moving countries yet again. You may have missed these, my favourite posts of the last year:

24th January: ...in which the cat is an Internet star

29th January: A milestone

7th March: Ruminations on the train

9th May: Photographers

12th May: Geography and Politics

10th July: Best day ever - since Tuesday

21st July: Bottrop Heimatmuseum in Namibia

1st August: When baboons attack

14th August: African Nights

14th September: Doing the Maasai Mara crush

29th October: The dreaded Marsabit Rd

19th November: More money lessons

12th December: How to ... Get your car out of customs in Egypt

27th December: GPS-less in the Middle East

Change of plan

It seems most overlanders go through this: before you start you make a plan. You pore over maps, read guide books, google locations, make top ten lists of places to visit. Then you leave and it all changes anyway. You meet other travellers who tell you about that beach, that park, that camp site you HAVE TO go to. So your route changes a bit and it’s all good. But then comes that moment when you make a mayor change. Like the Irish cyclists we just met who couldn’t get visas for Sudan initially so instead of travelling Ireland to Cape Town they went Addis to Cape, and then, when they could get the Sudan visa in the end, they flew back to Addis to carry on the rest of the way to Ireland the other way around. That’s thinking outside the box.

So long story short, after a lot of back and forth we have cancelled our Tunisia-Italy ferry, have sacked our Libya fixer and have decided to hang a right in Alexandria, travel through Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Greece and the Balkans to Germany. Shouldn’t take too much longer and we have the satisfaction of having done it all by road. Let’s just hope the Balkans in January isn’t that cold (yeah, right).

So if you are interested, the calendar is updated with approximate new dates (you can see the calendar at the bottom of the page). Of course, until we are re-united with our car we have no idea how long we will spend in Egypt, and therefore all dates are highly flexible.

The lowdown from Stuart

You can find the story of our Uganda trip as narrated by Stuart here and here.

Stuart has deserted us...

No more guest posts from Stuart, he has gone back to updating his own blog, so head over there if you want to get his take. In case you didn't realise, Merryl also writes a funny blog here.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Today is officially the first day of the Big Trip (also now known as Drive and Dive - And a Bit of Human Evolution). We are thirty days away from leaving - although we are planning to leave as early as we can, so we may well already be in Cape Town by the end of June.

To celebrate this date, I have been re-vamping the blog quite a bit, as it will be our primary news location during the trip. On the left I have posted a map to show the planned route (as blogged last week), where I will add the real route as soon as we start, so you can see how far apart the plan veers from reality.

There is also an intro for those people who might not know us and the plan to conquer Africa in a 'small' white car. There is also the Flickrstream of photos, which will be filled with travel photography courtesy of Stuart's fab camera, for your delectation and specifically to satisfy Jason's needs ;-)

At the bottom of the page you can find a calendar. So far it shows our rough timetable, which consists of a hopeful version of our schedule; sure to be superseded by reality as soon as we get on the road. As we are going along, we will update this with real dates and locations and - maybe - even important events.